


Reform Vitality

by Neelh



Category: Gravity Falls
Genre: Angst, Chaos Gods - Freeform, Fluff, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Mental Health Issues, SO MUCH FLUFF, Spoilers - Journal 3, Tiny Lesbian Pacifica Northwest, less fluff than originally anticipated
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-07-01
Updated: 2016-11-06
Packaged: 2018-07-19 12:43:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 8
Words: 18,549
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7361929
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Neelh/pseuds/Neelh
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Chaos is a force of nature; one that cannot be destroyed.</p>
<p>The Pines family have to learn this the hard way.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Burn

**Author's Note:**

> cw in this chapter for dissociation and mild violence

The air is still and thick with unsaid words and dirt from outside. Stanley adjusts his brother’s clothes on his body, trying to make them feel at least vaguely comfortable with their differing body types. Before Stanford had shared out his ridiculously strong liqueur that he probably shouldn’t be carrying around with the kids in the vicinity, Stanley had felt his hands quivering with a mix of emotions that he could barely identify through the noise in his head, but now his fingers are remarkably steady as he stuffs some old tissues into the extra finger on the glove.

And damn it, Ford’s fingers are slightly smaller than his own and the hand-stitched gloves are really tight. Stan wiggles his fingers around, trying to get used to the sensation. His fingers are kind of numb, but he guesses that’s normal. It doesn’t feel weird. Well, it does, but not in an unusual-weird. More like the weird when you forget that you’ve picked up an object and put it back down, and the thing’s just moved a millimetre. To be honest, nothing feels unusual-weird right now.

“Stanley,” he hears Ford say, but the sound feels distant and muffled, as if his brain is stuffed with cotton wool. “Stanley, can I-"

“Save it, Ford,” says Stanley. He doesn’t really know what his tone sounds like. He doesn’t really know anything. He feels kind of like he’s floating on a calm ocean, his ears rushing with the sound of the tide. The kids pop into his mind without warning, Dipper and Mabel, like a sudden spark in front of his eyes. They’re who he is doing this for. They’re the ones who matter, even if they do feel kind of like an abstract concept right now. They are an overwhelming feeling in his chest that makes him feel like he could cry.

“Stanley,” Ford repeats, and wow, there’s a hand on his upper arm now. Stan can feel it through the coarse fabric of Ford’s trenchcoat and the thick wool of the sweater. “Stanley, I wanted to tell you this for a while. Thank you for saving me. I-I love you, Stanley.”

And now Stan might be being hugged? He has absolutely no idea. It kind of feels like a hug, but it might just be that feeling in his chest left over from thinking about the kids. The feeling comes back, and its different from the other feeling of having his upper body clamped. He looks down. There are arms wrapped around his torso. That’s… Definitely a hug. He’s struck with a strange feeling that he should actually be caring about this moment and probably reciprocating. Or maybe not. It could either lead to them both hugging awkwardly, or the both of them patting each other and moving apart and never touching again. Either way, Stan can’t exactly move. Ford has him trapped in this weird hug and begins to sob.

Ford is crying. This is a new development that probably hasn’t happened in a while and Stan is still stuck being hugged and kind of wanting his personal space back. Probably. He’s not exactly in touch with his emotions right now.

“I… I can do a good enough impression of your voice, I think,” mutters Stanley. Dipper and Mabel. The other chest feeling that is not the feeling of being hugged by Ford. “The kids. Keep them safe?”

“They’re my entire world,” Stanford replies, his voice muffled by Stan’s bicep, or at least Stan thinks that he does. He’s not entirely sure. He starts to drift again, floating in the ocean. Ears muffled and brain stuffed with cotton wool.

 

Then there’s a noise, and the yellow triangle guy stomps back into the room, but he’s not yellow anymore, and he’s also more of a square-based pyramid, and Stan has vague recollections of that transformation happening. And he has the kids in his gold hand’s fist, and he’s saying something that sounds kind of like

 

**EENY**

 

And it’s familiar, somehow, like something that Stanley himself has said multiple times, but jokingly. Who’s taking out the trash? Who’s washing up? Who’s going to sweep up the majority of Mabel’s latest glitter explosion in the gift shop? It’s never going to be him. Okay, so it usually does end up being him. But only because everyone else runs away from the chores! He means, there could be a trash monster that Dipper would want to investigate or something! And he never will, because Stan always has to take out the trash.

 

**MEENY**

 

Stan’s gaze flickers over to the triangle guy’s eye. What’s his name again? Biff? Bob?  Tad? No, that’s the normal guy with the attractive voice who tried to pay with bread at the Shack once. Bill? Yeah, Bill Cipher. What a dumb name. Like, oh, I think I’ll call myself Tom Riddle, that’s not a stupid, unlikely name that nobody will ever take seriously. But Bill Cipher? Seriously? Stan has to stop himself from laughing every time that someone has a grim look in their eyes and growls Bill’s name like the guy is some sort of fictional overlord antagonist in some weird nonsensical movie.

 

**MINEY**

 

But anyway, Bill’s eye. And huh, he has a pine tree silhouette instead of a pupil. The same pine tree that Dipper’s hat has. Geez, there’s a lot of those hats. He has definitely not taken some off of the shelves in case Dipper loses his own. Nope.

Bill keeps doing his creepy thing where he’s big and makes the room all lit up red. And didn’t he say something when he came into the room? Something like, “I think I’ll-”

No. _No no no_. Stanley needs to stop this, and he knows that he needs to find his voice, no Ford’s voice, because he _is_ Ford now. He needs to say _stop_ , he needs to say _I surrender_ ; he needs to say something that Ford would say and it would be so easy if he could get past the ball of air in his throat that won’t let him say a word. He’s choking, and _the kids_ -

 

**YOU**

 

And Stan blinks, and Bill’s pupil is a shooting star, and he remembers the moment when the kids first stepped off of that Speedy Beaver bus to look at Gravity Falls with scepticism and excitement and Dipper’s old khaki brown hat and _Mabel’s favourite shooting star turtleneck_ -

 

And Bill clicks the fingers of one of his other hands and Stan tries to find his voice, even if all he would be able do was scream, and Mabel _burns_.

 

She is enveloped in flames, blue, and pink, and red, and indigo, and Stanley swallows the bile that rises in his throat. The flames are everywhere, and Stanley can’t see anything but the fire that Mabel is being consumed in. Bill drops her on the floor with Dipper, and she explodes into glitter and ash as her brother thuds down onto the stone floor and tries to find any scrap of her to hold.

 

“So what is it now, smart guy?” Bill asks him, asks Stan, and the vague half-remembered plan is _working_ , probably, and Stanley finally swallows the lump in his throat.

“I surrender,” he says – _Ford_ says – because he is Ford now; he can’t forget that. He has to keep his voice lower and smoother than normal.

“Good choice!” Bill says, transforming back into his yellow form.

“On one condition,” Stan continues. “You let my brother and Dipper go. You don’t hurt them. You don’t touch them.”

“Sure, whatever,” Bill says, holding out his hand; the same one that had gripped Mabel as she burnt next to her brother. “Now let me into your mind, Stanford Pines!”

And Stanley shakes Bill’s hand.

Bill rises; a silhouette of yellow, and rips into Stanley’s mind like a spoilt kid opening a particularly large birthday present. And if he screams, nobody will really care.

“Well well well, Stanford Pines, you’re certainly good at cleaning up your mind! Look at this! A nice, clean, orderly void!”

Bill opens the only door that Stanley has not erased from his mind, where Stan has projected himself in a little section of the living room.

“WHAT?” Bill screams.

The door slams shut, and Bill tries to leave and call the deal off, but Stanford comes through and the door begins to burn, like how Mabel burnt, fierce and cold and desperate.

“Do you have any idea what you’re _doing_?” Bill screams. “You’re going to _die_!”

“Like how you killed Mabel?” replies Stan, his tone dark. “Yeah, if you ever had a chance, it’s gone now. You messed with _my_ family, you killed _my_ niece, and you want out? _Fat chance_.”

“You’re making a mistake! You know you are!” screeches the demon. “It was your mistake that killed her!”

“Maybe it was,” Stanley says, his hands clenching into fists. He doesn’t know if he can feel his fingers, but he pretends that he can. It’s all the same in the mindscape. “Maybe it was my mistake that killed her. But it was also  _your_ fault. And that’s why you’re going down, right here, with me!”

Bill’s eye widens. “You can’t kill me! I am unstoppable! I’m a force of nature!”

Stanley smirks. “And I’m calling your bluff.”

Bill begins to disintegrate, and his best efforts to reform corrupt him even more as they both forget their shape, their purpose, their reason. But Stanley remains steady, untouched, remembering braces and glitter and yarn tangled everywhere like a fragile anchor. His fists remain solid and firm; harsh rock shaped by furious ocean waves. His aim is steady and true as he punches Bill in the eye, shattering the demon into nonexistence.

And then…

…Nothing.

He can see nothing but fire, then Mabel, then nothing except the hollow emptiness in his chest and in his mind.

 

-

 

Nothing. Just a blank, empty void. No feelings or awareness. There is a lack of anything, and the knowledge of that is the first spark of consciousness.

A flick of a finger. Navy blue, to make something. A sky, to exist and provide a location. Stars, distant formations of plasma crushing themselves slowly by their own gravity. A memory of learning that. A memory of everything. Remembering everything, from the loneliest root’s growth to the greatest pharaoh’s reign.

And remembering a brother with his nose in a book and the social awareness of a votive candle, stumbling through life together, laughing, crying, and all of the emotions that went with those simple expressions. Joy, anger, relief, spite, fear, love.

Senses. Sight and the beauty of every flower, every person, every creature and every single thing. Smelling baking bread and sweaty preteen boy. Feeling the wool of turtleneck sweaters and the cold weight of metal and the warm, coarse hair of a pig and grass under bare skin. Tasting sugar and fruit and fresh dewy air in the early morning. Hearing awful and pitchy renditions of various pop songs when _certain people_ are showering; hearing wind whistling through the cracks in the wall and creaking floorboards as a house breathes as though it is alive.

Mabel opens her eyes.


	2. World

Stanford cries.

The apocalypse is dissolving around him, the rift sealing itself back up like some sort of reverse Pandora’s Box, and all he can do is _cry_ like a pathetic baby. He grips the memory gun and falls to his knees, Stanley Pines fading from it slowly until Ford is certain that the words are just a glowing blue imprint left in his memory, in the back of his eyelids. Dipper stumbles over, clutches onto Stan’s suit jacket, against Ford’s chest. Ford absently holds him there. He feels Dipper’s soft hair, smells the sweat and grime that built up on the boy over however long Weirdmageddon lasted. Dipper shakes against his chest, with wracking, horrifying sobs that seem to fade to silence quickly until Dipper makes no sound other than an exhausted heavy breathing.

Stan kneels, mouth agape and eyes closed, and Ford can’t see through his tears anymore. He just wants to go home, back to the basement, back to dismantling the portal, back to hearing his family clatter about above him. Stanley is limp, like a corpse, despite the slow rise and fall of his chest. Ford stares at that breathing, no matter how subtle, because that means that Stanley is still alive, in his body if not in his mind. But then Ford blinks, and he does not open his eyes again.

His family is halved; it’s only Dipper and himself now, and the desperate hope that Stan is still in there somewhere in his mind. And Mabel… They don’t even have her _body_.

And Ford feels the dampness of grass under his knees; smells the humid air of the greener parts of the forest; he hears the birds sing. He opens his eyes, lifts his head, and blinks back his remaining tears. Stan is in the undergrowth, and Dipper is still sobbing quietly against Ford’s chest.

“Stanley!” he shouts, and the last time that he heard his own voice was from his brother’s mouth as Stan lied with a tongue of quicksilver. It was not a perfect imitation, but maybe he was the only one who could hear the tiny hints of Stanley, or maybe he imagined flaws in the impression. He shakes his head free of his thoughts and rushes over to his brother, picking up Dipper gently before placing him back down closer to Stan, and kneels down in front of Stanley. He calls his brother’s name like a magic spell that could ensure that his brother would reply and would know and remember his face like his own reflection.

“Er… Who’s that?” Stan asks, blinking a couple of times as Ford grips his shoulders. “Who’s Stanley?”

And yet again, Ford’s eyes begin to well up with tears. “It’s… It’s you. You’re Stanley. You’re my brother.”

Ford flings his arms around his brother, tight enough that he can feel their heartbeats join together; two steady rhythms out of time with each other. He clenches his hands around his own trenchcoat, and tenses. He kind of wants his coat and turtleneck back, because he doesn’t feel exactly like himself without them.

Maybe Stan, beyond all odds, is the same.

“You’re wearing my clothes,” says Ford, pulling away from Stanley but not letting go. “If we switch clothes, maybe it’ll help to, uh, jog your memory.”

Stanley shrugs. Ford watches him as they stand up. His posture is less tense and hunched, and his eyes seem a lot less heavy. The corners of his mouth are more relaxed. Ford looks away and shrugs off the suit jacket.

“Dipper, please can you go and find Stanley’s fez?” he asks.

The boy doesn’t respond. He stares into space, not having moved from where Stanford had placed him minutes before. The wind blows through his hair gently, and leaves rustle behind him as though they are drying despite the warm, damp air. Dipper keeps on staring, his gaze unfixed, his eyes unblinking.

“Dipper? Dipper?” Stanford’s voice rises in pitch and he reaches out to touch his great-nephew’s shoulder. The boy blinks into a bleary state of alertness, kind of like how Stan was in the mornings during Ford’s childhood.

“What is it, Grunkle Ford?” he asks. His voice is barely more than a whisper.

“Please can you find Stanley’s fez?” Stanford repeats. “We’re… Ah, we’re going to get changed back into our own clothes, and the fez is rather...”

Dipper nods with silent understanding and scurries off into the forest. A twig snaps under his feet, making him jump, but he continues his journey after a moment’s pause and disappears into the trees. Ford looks back at his brother, who seems to turn his head at the same time.

“Are… Are you sure it’s a good idea to let the kid go into the forest on his own?” Stanley asks. “He seemed a little, uh, out of it.”

Ford blinks. This man was the one who initially allowed them to play outside in the woods, ignoring the safety risks detailed in the book he had guarded and read for thirty years and just letting Dipper and Mabel go ahead and play as much as they wanted. He was the one who figured that those kids are tough enough to hold their own against pretty much everything. And now, after the world has ended, he’s showing concern for what is probably the least dangerous thing that Dipper has done over the past, the past, after however long it’s been?

But this isn’t the same man. This is an empty shell with the basic personality of a person who could have become Stanley Pines, once upon a time.

“His sister just died,” says Ford. “Please can we change back into our clothes? I miss my trenchcoat.”

They turn away from each other as they change, leaving clothing in a little pile on the ground on top of their coats. At some point, Ford hears Stan yelp about his finger coming off before apparently investigating Ford’s glove. When Ford slips on his turtleneck, he sighs out a breath that he didn’t realise that he was holding.

“You didn’t see?” Ford asks, trying to sound casual. This is his goddamn _brother_ ; the boy with whom he shared a room for eighteen years, and the man who spent thirty years working to rescue him. And they were strangers now, so much more than they ever were before.

“See what?” Stanley asks. “I can’t see you. Are you dressed yet?”

“Just a second,” replies Ford as he zips up his flies. “And I, um. I meant my scars.”

“Why… Why would I want to see your scars?” Stan says flatly. Ford shrugs and turns around, pulling his trenchcoat on to see Stanley with his shirt unbuttoned. “Sorry, my fingers keep shaking and I can’t do the buttons.”

Ford glances at his brother, gesturing between himself and the buttons, and Stanley nods and shrugs at the same time. It’s awkward, buttoning up the shirt, partially because Stan should have been able to do it himself but he can’t and that’s kind of distressing for reasons that Ford can’t pinpoint currently. Still, it’s also because he has not been this physically close to Stan for so long in a very long time, if this man even is Stanley. Well, he definitely is Stan, with the same joints and bones and tendons and flesh, but his mind is diluted, or purified, depending on how Ford looks at it. He’s lost all of the little facets that his long life had chipped into his personality; he has been wiped clean and polished like silverware.

“Speaking of scars,” Stanley says as Ford finishes buttoning up the shirt and moves back, “I saw a few on myself. There was one on my arm. Quite a few, actually.”

“One of them you got in Las Vegas last month,” Dipper’s voice says. Ford looks around, his neck cracking at the sudden movement, and he rubs it with one hand as he locates Dipper. The boy is clutching Stanley’s fez to his chest like a teddy bear. “You were… You went with a statue of a gold miner for some reason. You were gambling with counterfeit money and when a bouncer tried to ID you, you didn’t have one, and Grunkle Stan, you choose really bad places to gamble, can I just say that? Because I’m pretty sure that it’s illegal to pull a switchblade on someone who just sassed you.”

Stanley blinks. “I have literally no memory of that.” Seeing Dipper’s dejected look, he kneels down. “But, uh, thanks kid. I don’t suppose you know why there’s one on the back of my hand?”

Dipper opens his mouth slowly, then closes it again. “We… Should probably go back to the shack.” He picks up Stan’s tie with one hand and loops it around the man’s neck before placing the fez on his head.

“The shack?” Stan asks, glancing at Ford. He begins to stand up with a groan, and Dipper helps support a little bit of his weight.

“Your home,” says Ford. “You turned it into a tourist trap, and it’s amazing. Not to my taste, but from an objective viewpoint, it’s brilliant! And I guess I’ll start repairing it. We all need somewhere to sleep tonight.”

“That’s great, I guess,” Stanley says flatly.

Ford lowers his head. What was he thinking? This guy isn’t Stanley, not anymore. Maybe he could figure out a way in the lab? Somehow, he could probably get Stan back. But would Bill come back, too? Would he have sacrificed his brother and great-niece for nothing?

…Does he even care anymore?

Dipper grips both of their hands, standing between them and leading the way back home. Ford’s right hand is left free for him to circle his thumb around each individual finger. Usually, he would roll a dice between his fingers, but he must have left his normal one on his desk in the basement before Weirdmageddon instead of leaving it in his pocket.

Before he screwed up badly enough to cause the _apocalypse_ , before he killed two members of his family and who knows how many other people.

One. One member of his family, because Stanley is still here, kind of. Mabel should still be here too; but he lived to return through the portal instead of dying thirty years ago like he should have done; he created the rift. And Mabel paid the price.

They don’t even have a body to mourn over.

Stanford has read _Frankenstein_ many times. He spent a lot of time trying to understand how Victor Frankenstein created life from nothingness, and though it took a while, he eventually came up with a working theory that he never _did_ put into practise. Now, Stanford could do that, he knows that he definitely can, given the proper motivation and a few adjustments to his original theory. It would require tests beforehand to ensure that nothing went wrong in the reviving process, so Mabel’s corpse would have to be preserved in order to-

But isn’t that the point? There’s no corpse. He can’t save her. He didn’t close the rift, his own little interdimensional Pandora’s Box, and he lost the world’s hope. Or rather, his own.

So all of his energies will have to go towards looking after Stan. He needs to restore Stanley, and leave Bill dead. He needs to save someone. He needs to be able to lift his head and say, _“I have helped. I have done something. I haven’t been a complete waste.”_

Even if his only use to the world was just to fix his own terrible mistakes.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i have an updating schedule!
> 
> ...it's when i finish the next chapter. good luck me


	3. Gift

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> there's more dissociation in this one, and a panic attack, viewed through the eyes of a third party

Wendy raps on the door once, out of politeness. The shack’s sign is switched over to closed, and Wendy can’t really blame them for that. Gravity Falls is in shambles, but it will repair itself. She knocks twice again, just to make sure that someone heard, and opens the door. The doors haven’t been locked in the rest of the town since the apocalypse, and that seems to hold true even in this little cabin.

Stan looks up when the door creaks open with a belated, “Who’s there?” and Wendy grins. He’s definitely still doing good, if that grunt that passes for Stan’s speech is anything to go by. It’s a lot better than his screams of fear as he was wrapped in Bill’s tentacle-like arms the last time Wendy saw him.

“Hey! It’s good to see that you’re okay,” she grins. “I, uh, actually came here for Dipper and Mabel, but I got this for you,” she says, slinging her sturdy-looking navy rucksack onto the counter and unzipping it swiftly. She hefts out a twelve-pack of beer and places it next to her rucksack before she hooks the strap over her shoulder again. With a conspiratorial wink, she says, “It’s the good stuff.”

“Really, kid? It, um, really doesn’t look like you’re old enough to be buying booze,” Stan replies, raising an eyebrow.

“Buying booze? With what you pay me? No way,” laughs Wendy. “And of course I’m not old enough, Mr. Pines. You wouldn’t employ me if it wasn’t illegal. I stole it.”

Stan nods with an approving smile, before his head jerks stop with a suddenness that must have cricked, his eyes wide. “Wow, that guy I used to be was _weird_.”

“Uh, Stan, are you okay?” she asks, approaching the man. He’s standing by the shelf of snowglobes that she marked up to two hundred dollars a while back. They still sold like hotcakes, though. She didn’t know just how willing to spend money tourists were until she started working here.

He blinks back to alertness, shaking his head. “Uh, yes. I just… I kind of lost my memory during the apocalypse? I think that’s what Ford said. Apocalypse… Could’ve been eclipse…”

“Definitely apocalypse,” Wendy says. _Fuck_. No wonder he was so weird. Maybe she could get away with making him pay her more. No, that’s not what she’s here for. “Uh, where’s Dipper and Mabel?”

“Dipper’s upstairs, I think,” Stan says, his face going from remarkably expressive to blank.

Wendy lifts her hand for a moment, before lowering it again. “Okay. Thank you.”

Stan doesn’t react. Wendy turns to open the door that leads to the house, but it swings open before she can touch the handle. The man who is the spitting image of her boss stands there, bags under his eyes and clothes creased. His eyes are wide as he runs a hand through his hair.

“Have you seen Dipper?” he asks, his eyes landing on Wendy. He speaks as though he is forcing every word out with his breaths; like he has run for miles; like he is being suffocated.

“Isn’t he upstairs?” Wendy raises an eyebrow. Great! Great. Now she has one Pines apparently dissociating, one missing, and one apparently having a panic attack. Okay. She can calm him down; she’s gone through similar things. She can do it.

She has never tried to talk anyone out of a panic attack before. She has no idea what she is doing.

The man, the six-fingered author of the journals that Dipper had obsessed over, his Great-Uncle Ford, blanches. “No, I checked,” he says. He begins to tug on a handful of hair and mutters unintelligibly under his breath.

“Hey, look at me, dude,” Wendy says. _Keep the anxiety down_ , she thinks, _he might be like how Mabel is and be able to pick up on it_. She lifts her hand again hesitantly, but grasps Ford’s hand instead of lowering it. She intertwines her fingers, trying to stop him from pulling his hair out. “Uh, Ford?”

He looks at her, eyes wide with fear, and _crap_ , he looks so much like his niece and nephew. They have the same brown eyes; the same as Stan’s; and she wishes that she didn’t know what bone-chilling fear looked like on all four of them.

Wendy squeezes his hand. “Okay, which rooms have you checked?”

“Bedroom,” he says. His voice is quiet. “Stan’s and their own. Bathroom. ‘S unlocked, nobody in. Rest of the attic’s empty, too. What if he’s gone?”

“I haven’t seen him,” says Stan from behind Wendy. “And I’ve been all over the house. Unless you’ve got, I dunno, a secret basement or something.”

Wendy drops Ford’s hand and turns around to look at her possibly former boss. She just stares for a moment, because _how the hell_? Stan scratches his butt. During that moment of gobsmacked eye contact, Ford thuds over to the vending machine in some sort of weird stagger and punches the code in, before his knees seem to give out, and Wendy rushes to grab his elbow.

“Slow down, Ford, you’re gonna fall over,” she says, her voice rising in pitch.

“Stan, thank you,” breathes Ford hoarsely before rushing down the stairs as quickly as he could with Wendy holding his elbow. Damn it, he’s worse than her brothers with needing to be reined in. She glances over her shoulder to see that Stan has gone back to staring at the gift shop display. That’s probably for the best, to be honest. Who knows what Dipper’s doing in the basement?

 

-

 

Ford had first taken Wendy to a study, covered with tapestries of Bill that felt like they were watching her. After searching the place for Dipper, they had decided that the kid was definitely not on that floor of the basement. And seriously, who has multiple floors in a basement? Ford, apparently.

The other floor, Ford had said, was locked and the key was in his pocket. That had left the basement, and to be honest, Wendy could now see why Soos had described it as creepy.

The room is about as tall as the rest of the Shack combined, and except for a laboratory about the size of the attic, it is wide open and full of heavy air. The remnants of the portal that the twins and Soos had talked about lay on the far side of the room, like an ancient tombstone.

She glances at Ford. His eyes flicker around as he walks through the lab and opens the simple door to the portal room. He seems almost hypnotised as he drags his feet slowly to the centre of the room, then falls to his knees.

“Ford!” calls Wendy, rushing over to him. “We’re looking for Dipper, remember?”

Ford shrugs. ”My fault,” he mutters.

“No it’s not,” Wendy says, wrapping a careful arm around his shoulders. “It’s nobody’s fault but that dumb triangle.”

“I killed her,” he mutters, and Wendy tenses. Wasn’t the triangle guy a dude? Everyone seemed to refer to him as a he and stuff.

Before she can ask, a timid, familiar voice says from the doorway, “Grunkle Ford?”

“Dipper!” Wendy beams, standing up and rushing over to him. She kneels to hug him, but he doesn’t return the gesture. Eventually she pulls away and swings her rucksack down onto the floor. “Wait a sec, I got you a present.”

As she rifles through the contents, Dipper rests his head on her shoulder, his eyes closed. Wendy tries to forget about the crush thing, and instead pats his hatless head. Eventually, she finds the book that she had been looking for. The hardback compilation of The Siblings Brothers stories was kind of easy to find when she had told the bookstore owner that an excellent use of his time could be opening early the day after the apocalypse so that she could buy a gift for one of the town’s heroes.

She’s still only fifteen. She doesn’t need to shoplift everything yet.

Dipper takes the book, slightly battered from its trip in Wendy’s bag, and holds it against his chest like a teddy bear. “Thanks,” he says, his voice cracking.

“You’re welcome,” grins Wendy, ruffling his hair. “Anyway, where’s Mabel? I’ve got a present for her, too.”

Dipper’s face falls. His eyes begin to well up with tears, and from the red tint from his eyes that Wendy can see in the dim light, it’s not the first time.

“Jesus, _no_ ,” Wendy breathes as Dipper begins to cry and her brain finally puts two and two together.

Then Ford crouches next to her, and Dipper falls into his arms. Ford stands to leave, and Wendy follows, carrying her bag in her hand by one strap.

 _Hell_. Wendy had thought that Mabel was safe, curled up with Dipper and her family at home, making sure that everyone was happy, cuddling her family and being looked after and looking after them but she’s not; she’s _dead_. But Mabel, the vivacious child in lurid pink, that child _can’t_ be dead.

But Dipper wouldn’t lie about that; Dipper couldn’t lie for jack shit. And that left Wendy with the fact that the preteen who had quickly become one of her closest friends was _dead_.

Ford holds open the elevator door with his foot as Wendy drags her feet. The stuffed lion in Wendy’s bag feels like a heavier weight than the beer and the book now.

Wendy enters the elevator and leans slightly against the side. “I’m sorry I didn’t get you anything, Ford, I just didn’t know what you’d want.”

For a moment, Wendy makes eye contact with Stanford, and his eyes are just full of despair. Then he blinks, looks away, and his grip tightens on Dipper’s vest. Dipper doesn’t move, instead just letting Ford hold him as if he were a precious ragdoll.

The elevator rumbles as it goes up. It’s pretty old, Wendy knows; older than her, for sure. And there was about as much chance of Stan having it maintained or repaired as there was of him giving Wendy a raise, especially in his current state. That is to say, it was not very fucking likely.

But Jesus Christ, _Mabel_.

“Funeral?” she says as they leave the elevator and they start to climb the stairs. She meant to put that word in a sentence and ask it more sensitively, but Ford just shrugs slightly.

“There wasn’t a body,” he mumbles. Dipper seems to tense at that, and Ford begins to, most likely subconsciously, rock him gently backwards and forwards. By the time that Wendy opens the door of the vending machine, Dipper has calmed down.

Ford carries Dipper like a baby to the kitchen; places him in a chair; gives him a bendy straw to use to drink his milk. Dipper sips pliantly and scoops the soggy cereal Ford gives him into his mouth. They’re basic cornflakes, nothing special or sugary. Wendy takes the sprinkle jars that Mabel had left on the side counter and slides them to the back of the top shelf, behind the alcohol stash that is usually collectively ignored by the Pines family. Well, Ford will probably get some use out of it.

Wendy takes her hat off, slumps at the kitchen table, and runs a hand through her hair. She hasn’t washed it in days. Speaking of days, “You know?” she says. “It’s six days until the end of summer. Weirdmageddon lasted four or five days. How does that even happen?”

“Time bubble,” Ford says absently. “Time moves forwards inside at a ridiculous speed that makes it seem as if no time is passing outside. I’ve been to multiple worlds where the sky was a time bubble. That’s where the orange came from, I believe. But the bubble had only been set up for a year when i broke out, but generations lived and died within minutes. Of course, this was highly advanced, and when I popped the bubble, time began moving normally again. The time bubble used for Weirdmageddon seemed rather weak, though.”

“Most of the town’s repaired, too,” Wendy continues, trying to ignore the vortex filling half of her head that just says _Mabel_. “There’s like, pretty much no repair works going on except for the stuff that the townspeople trashed. I think that Gideon’s looking for the journals? Apparently those burnt up, so-”

“Would you like coffee?” Stanford asks, his voice strained.

“I guess?” says Wendy automatically. She pauses for a moment and tugs on a strand of hair. “Do you, uh, want me to call Soos? He can probably help with Stan.”

Ford grunts, so Wendy pulls out her phone and sends a text over.

_Meet me at shack, dont come in until i explain eerything. Theres some things you need to know_

Thirty seconds later, Stanford plonks a cup of coffee in front of her and sits down at the table, holding his own mug. Wendy’s phone buzzes on the table, and Ford winces.

_okie dokie dude! wait, what’s wrong? be there in 5. or 6. probably 10_

Within eight minutes, there is a knock on the back door of the Mystery Shack, and Wendy leaps up to get it. She sees Dipper watching her and grins, leaving her bag on the floor and ruffling his head through his hat.

“Is everyone okay? I came as fast as I could,” Soos says as soon as she opens the door. “Mr. Pines’s driving lessons paid off!”

If Soos had said something about how he wanted to thank Stan for those driving lessons, then Wendy would have had a dramatic opening for saying that no; Mr. Pines was now an amnesiac who stares at random objects quite often. But he does not; so she cannot.

Instead, Wendy says, “Mabel’s dead.”

She wasn’t ever one much for gentleness and subtlety.

Soos laughs. “That’s a good one, dawg.”

“I’m serious!” exclaims Wendy. “Mabel’s dead and Stan’s lost his memory and Dipper and Ford are grieving, I guess? Dipper’s…” She thinks about her brothers and tries to imagine how she would feel if one of them died, and she winces. “He’s doing as well as he can in the situation.”

Soos stares at her, making stubborn eye contact. “Wendy, this isn’t funny.”

Behind his barrier of quiet anger, there seems to be horrified realisation and grief in his hazel eyes. Wendy’s seen enough grief to last a lifetime already. She just wants it to _stop_. She doesn’t reply to Soos; instead she just holds his gaze as well as she can. His lower lip wobbles and he collapses against her.

“You’re lying,” he whimpers, and Wendy can feel her shoulder dampen with warm tears. She wraps her arms around his shoulders and continues to stand, still staring at where Soos had been a minute before. If she cries, she ignores it, just like she always has.


	4. Homeschooled

Mabel might be only four foot eight and a millimetre, but as she stares at her surroundings, she does not feel small.

That’s not to say that her surroundings are small; in fact, they are far from it. She floats in the infinite concepts of knowledge and understanding that surround her like tiny colourful bubbles made of mist. Some things are far too distant for her to know of or about, but what she does know would make Dipper pee his pants in excitement.

“Dipper,” she says, and the word vibrates silently through the air, like a thought.

“Mabel,” another voice replies, and Mabel isn’t even going to get _near_ the complexities of voices and actual physical bodies in a realm where everything appears to be silent abstraction. So she makes a conscious decision that thought, for now at least, is speech. It’s close enough, anyway.

“Mabel, pay attention,” the voice repeats. It’s not Dipper. Dipper, she knows somehow, is earth and peanut butter and waterproof nylon, while the voice she can hear, in a manner of speaking and/or thinking, is galaxies and fireworks and viscosity.

“Mabel, I am Knowledge,” the voice says. “I am everything you know, everything you will know, and all that you have once forgotten and will never forget again.”

Mabel shrugs. “Eh, I forget lots of things. I don’t think that you can guarantee that.”

“You have been given a duty-“

Mabel snorts into her metaphysical hand. “Heh, duty.”

“-to become a vessel,” continues the voice, ignoring Mabel’s childish distraction.

“Wait, a vessel?” Mabel’s eyes widen, trying to take in the space around her; the indescribable most-likely-navy surroundings and the stars of pure knowledge. “I never agreed to become a vessel! I’m a Mabel!” She begins to wail in that dramatic way that communicates exactly how strongly she is feeling this very strong emotion. “I’m a little girl! _A little girl_ , I tell you!”

The voice pauses for a moment, and for a moment it feels kind of like when Dipper or Stan pulls that face, when she’s said something sillier than usual and they aren’t sure how to respond. She once saw them both do it at the same time for a full five seconds; mouths open in a long oval shape with their upper teeth showing and their eyes squinting a little. When Mabel tried to imitate it in the mirror, it felt kind of like she was smiling in an awkward, Dipper-ish way. But the voice continues to speak after about half a second, and it says in its measured cadence, “Those two things are not mutually exclusive. You can continue to be Mabel Pines as much as you are now also the embodiment of chaos and life.”

Mabel makes a farting noise with her mouth, her eyes wide. “ _Woah_. I’m, like, twelve, though. Isn’t that an itsy-bitsy, teeny-weeny, _tiiiiiiiiiny_ little bit too much responsibility to be placed on me? I mean, I accidentally caused the apocalypse.” Mabel’s mouth falls open. “Oh my gosh, I caused the _apocalypse_! _I_ caused the _apocalypse_!”

“Mabel!” the voice says sharply, and dang it, the more she hears it the more she can hear Dipper. “You didn’t cause the apocalypse,” it says, “and if you follow my instructions, you can see who did.”

Most of what followed, only Mabel and the voice could have ever possibly fully understood. To human ears and minds, it would probably feel like mispronounced Welsh spoken backwards, then reversed again with a recording, translated into Somalian by someone who only speaks Icelandic, then translated into Icelandic by someone who only speaks Somalian, and then recited by a thousand elderly women attempting a Texan accent. In this concept, the only word that could possibly be distinguished in every single language that ever was, and every language that could ever be, was _focus_.

So Mabel does just that, and focuses on what the voice is telling her.

The space in front of her, as she reaches out and flicks her hand upwards with her index finger extended, opens like a zip and creates some kind of hole. Images flash through it like faded photographs and she can hear and taste and smell distant snippets, but they are all of the same thing.

“Bill?” she asks, half of her face pulling into the Dipper-and-Stan expression as the image settles on a stone triangle with its hand extended outwards, half-buried in the woods. For a fleeting moment, she can smell the grass and trees. It’s a bit more humid than normal in the woods.

The voice gives the neural impression of a shrug. “Who else? He entered your world when it was new. He stole the chance for it to develop its own life; its own chaos. And now that he’s dead, the only chance for it to live on was in the most recent deceased soul.”

Mabel tugs on a bit of her hair before saying in a lighter tone, “So I can see anything with this world-zippy thingy?”

The voice doesn’t comment on the change of subject, instead just saying, “Yes.”

Mabel beams, zipping shut the old window and opening a new one with the expression of a constipated seal. “I’m gonna see Waddles!” she grins with a supreme soaring of elation in her stomach. She smiles at the window, flapping her hands with each repetition of “Waddles now, Waddles now, Waddles now!”

_“Stop it, Waddles,” Dipper’s distant voice groans quietly. She watches her pig nuzzle her brother’s dangling right wrist as he lies on his bed, staring into the distance with dull eyes. Damn, what was it that Grunkle Stan had said that one time? Bag check for Dipper’s eyes? Because yeah, accurate. Waddles licks his hand and Dipper swats at the pig pathetically. “Please, quit it.”_

_Waddles oinks adorably, sitting down and continuing to nuzzle Dipper._

_“Quit it!” he yells, pushing himself up into a sitting position and glaring at the pig. “She’s dead! Go… Go bug Stan or something! It’s not like he gives a…”_

_Dipper picks up Waddles gingerly and places him on his bed. He curls around the pig, and his shoulders begin to shake._

_“She’s not coming back,” he sobs, and Mabel can hardly hear him through the window. “She’s dead and she can’t come back and…”_

Mabel turns away and zips up the window.

“I’m going back,” she says flatly, because it’s Serious Mabel Mode Time. _Seriously_.

The voice gives suggestions of panic, and Mabel forces them aside like inconveniently springy head-height branches because they _just keep on pinging back_. “You _can’t_! You still-”

“I have to!” Mabel cries out, holding her palms out open in front of her to punctuate her point. “My brother is sad and my pig is sad and I have to fix that!”

“You still have to learn!” the voice replies, feeling higher-pitched than it did before. “You need to learn what this all entails!”

“I can learn by myself! Please,” Mabel wraps her arms around her body and continues to speak. “Let me help them.”

“I can’t say no to you,” the voice sighs. “Even though that’s mostly because you literally control everything. Focus on where you want to go, and step through the window.”

Mabel squeezes her arms tighter around her body and smiles at the world around her, trying to get across the idea that she is giving a Patented Mabel Hug. The voice responds with similar warm emotions.

“Thank you,” she whispers, and remembers the night sky above the Mystery Shack. She flicks a finger and opens a window, smiling at how beautiful it looks from this birds-eye angle. The sun is setting, and Mabel pauses for a moment to admire the image before putting both legs through the window and pushing herself through like a child about to go down a slide. The window closes a moment after.

 

-

 

Mabel takes in a deep breath as she hovers above her home. The last rays of the sun still peer over the horizon, leaving a few orange-tinted clouds in the blue-black sky. She takes a moment to spin around, letting her real, physical, and not-a-conceptualisation-for-her-own-comfort skirt swish around her legs and looks through the stars absently. Her eyes settle on the Big Dipper naturally, and she smiles softly.

Ah. Braces pain. She did not miss this.

She looks back down at the Mystery Shack. There’s the big sign without the ‘S’, and Mabel pauses.

“Ign,” she snorts quietly.

But there’s home, and Grunkle Stan is sitting on the porch in his underwear, on the old yellow couch with the springs that never poke out in the same place twice. He stares out into the woods vacantly, holding a can of Pitt soda in one hand loosely. Mabel swishes her arms upwards, her sweater sleeves flapping a little, and points her toes so she lands on the grass gently.

For some reason, she was expecting to feel the slightly damp grass as easily as she can feel every air molecule bump against her skin gently and carry on their merry little ways. Shoes. That’s why she can’t. Shoes and socks; her old enemy and beloved love. Why must to be so cosy and weird-feeling?

“Grunkle Stan!” she calls, and he blinks with a grimace.

Mabel runs over to him, arms outstretched, but he blocks her by gently holding her at arm’s length. He looks at her with a vaguely confused smile.

“Uh, hey, kid,” he says, and his voice lacks a certain Grunkliness that makes Stan _Stan_. He still sounds all gravelly and on the surface he is very much Stannish, but there’s a certain depth involving crankiness covering up affection like a hairy crème brûlée of emotions that is missing. “Are you, um, that Dipper kid’s sister?”

Mabel nods, her face falling. “Don’t you remember me?” she asks, already knowing the answer.

Stan shrugs, dropping his hand from Mabel’s shoulders and patting the seat next to him once. Mabel smiles softly and sits down next to him, thankfully avoiding any springs. “I don’t remember much of anything,” he replies, staring out into the trees again. “At least, I don’t think so. Sometimes when I’m doing nothing, I’ll see snippets of things. Weird things, like short shorts and giant metal triangles and a _lot_ of that chair in the living room.”

There is a slight pause as Mabel stares at Stan and waits for him to look at her again. He continues to stare into the outskirts of the forest. An owl hoots.

“I like that chair,” Stan says. “It hugs my butt.”

Another owl hoots back. The two owls hoot together. Match made!

“But you don’t remember?” Mabel asks, curling her legs up under her skirt.

Stan shakes his head with a kind of easy flippancy that knocks his fez askew on the back of the couch. “Nope.”

“Do…” Mabel pauses, glancing at a patch of grass that’s rustling a little in the slight breeze. She tucks a strand of brown hair behind her ear and looks back at Stan hesitantly. “Do you want to?”

Stan laughs, and it sounds kind of empty, but making up for it with bluster and jokes. “Sure! Why not? It would… It would explain the hotpants.”

“Worry no more, Grunkle-ish Stan,” grins Mabel, back to what feels like a normal level of enthusiasm for life in general. “I can probably do that! Hopefully.”

Stan looks at her, an eyebrow raised. “Are you sure?”

“Nope!” she beams. “It’s Doctor Mabel’s new experimental treatment. Boop!”

She flicks his nose, and as he stares in disbelief, Mabel focuses on Stanley Pines’s memories and opens a tiny window in his brain. Stan’s eyes widen, and then his pupils roll upwards and into the back of his head. For what feels like an entire Grunkle’s lifespan, the two of them sit there, but Mabel guesses that it was probably three seconds.

When Stan’s eyes go back to normal, she closes the window and smiles hopefully. “Do you remember now?”

Grunkle Stan gives a grin like an elderly Cheshire Cat. “No, I don’t think so. Maybe a hug will bring them ba- _Oh my gosh Mabel I can’t breathe_.”

Mabel loosens her grip for a moment, and Stan exaggerates his gasp of breath. “Help!” he yells. “I’m being murdered!”

He pretends to choke as Mabel squishes him in an even tighter hug than before. She relishes every feeling that her senses can detect, even Grunkle Stan’s weird old man smell, savouring the familiarity and the knowledge that she has come _home_.

And then she gets knocked off of Stan and into the grass. It’s not actually damp at all. It’s kind of dry, actually.

“Leave, Shapeshifer,” Grunkle Ford growls. He holds the blue gun that he tried to fight the nerd wizard with that one time before Mabel and Grenda go to go on an epic wizard quest. Only this time, it’s aimed at her, and he doesn’t even think to do the swirly thing. Which, you know, is really unfair.

“Ford,” Grunkle Stan says cautiously, but all Mabel can see is the gun and the cold glare in Grunkle Ford’s eyes.

“Leave us,” he repeats, his voice betraying no emotion. “We’ve already lost one family member to the monsters here, and I will be fucking _damned_ if I let _you_ take a second.”

Okay, so now Mabel can pinpoint two emotions; barely-suppressed rage and pure hatred. She can’t really tell if that’s a good thing or not.

“Stanford!” Grunkle Stan yells, throwing his can of Pitt Cola to the ground. “You listen to me _right now_! That’s our great-niece, and she just came back and gave me my memories back, so put the gun _down_!”

Ford looks away from her to stare at Stan. “ _Mabel is dead_!” he shouts. “I want her back just as much as you do, but we can’t delude ourselves like this.” Ford blinks and does a double take. “Stanley? You remember?”

“Well, clearly Bill didn’t kill her, because she’s right here!” Stan says, gesturing with both hands at Mabel, who brushes herself off and scrambles up onto the porch in front of the door.

“Actually, he did!” she says, waving her arms to get their attention. “I died, and I went to this weird place where everything was abstract thought that somehow had form and I learnt everything and-“

The door creaks open. Dipper, vestless, hatless, and sockless, stands there, swaying slightly, staring at Mabel with a face as pale as if he has seen a ghost. Which yeah, Mabel’s gonna give him that, she did just kind of _die_.

He makes a little croaking noise, his mouth slightly agape. Mabel waves, and she couldn’t wipe the smile off of her face if she wanted to.

“Mabel,” he finally says. “Either I’ve lost it, or you’re here.”

She makes a little fart noise with her mouth. “You lost it way before I died, brobro.”

Dipper snorts a little as he reaches out and touches Mabel’s hand. It’s clammy and colder than Mabel’s own, but it’s familiar. This is Dipper, and she is Mabel, and they’re together again. Dipper squeezes her hand, as if he’s making sure that she’s real; like her hand could be anything but real and attached to flesh and blood and Mabelness.

As if he has finally made a decision on her realness, or if he’s just decided to literally embrace the hallucination, Dipper throws himself into Mabel’s waiting arms. She holds him close, swaying gently backwards and forwards, his face buried in her turtleneck.

“I was so scared,” he chokes out. “I thought you were gone for good. I didn’t… I couldn’t do anything.”

Mabel strokes his hair and continues to rock until he stops sobbing and pulls away. His eyes are red-rimmed and wide, and there’s a speck of glitter on his cheek.

“Waddles,” says Dipper, with an air of realisation.

“Waddles,” she repeats, her face reflecting Dipper’s but with a wide smile.

Mabel begins to flap her hands until Ford speaks up. “Yes, that pig does seem to be remarkably intelligent.”

“No he’s not,” snorts Grunkle Stan.

Waddles oinks from the doorway, distracting his owner from pouting at Stan in his defence.

“Waddes!” Mabel squeals, crouching down to pick up her pig. He bounds into her arms and begins to lick her face enthusiastically, before curling up with a contented snort.

Mabel looks up at Ford, who has an expression that is not confused as much as it is having an internal war. Finally, he exhales through his nose and he pens his eyes to smile at Mabel, kneeling down to be at her height. For a long moment, neither of them move, until Ford hugs her gently and carefully.

“I’m sorry,” he whispers. “I just… I can’t believe this. Well, I can, but…”

Mabel pulls away slightly to smile at Ford, their noses nearly touching. “I know. But right now, I just want to cuddle up with you all and watch a movie. Is… Is that okay?”

Mabel feels another hand ruffle her hair. “Well, I’m up for that, sweetie,” Grunkle Stan says from above her head.

Ford breaks into a quiet smile. “I don’t see why not.”


	5. Foam Cloud

Because he’s so busy keeping his eyes on the road, he doesn’t register Wendy speaking in the seat beside him until she yells, “Giant pothole, Soos!”

“Nah, dawg,” says Soos, swerving around the crater in the middle of the dirt road. The steering wheel hasn’t fallen off since he fixed it last time with… Well. It hasn’t broken in a while. “I think the manotaurs were fighting again.”

Wendy sighs. “Did you introduce them to _Fire-Breathing Lizard Worm XYD: Bigger Powerfuller Hairier Edition_?”

Soos laughs sheepishly, taking his hand off the steering wheel to scratch the back of his neck. “It was only three episodes?”

The passenger side dashboard makes a _thump_ as Wendy lets her head fall on it in lieu of hiding her exasperated face in her hands. She then sits up, sighing with a smile. “You’re really bad at the whole – _Soos! Wrong side!_ – the whole multitasking thing, now that I think of it.”

“Dude, you should totally try it,” he replies. “If you only focus on one irrelevant thing, it lets you forget everything that hurts you.”

Wendy blinks as Soos smiles at her. He… He isn’t being very reassuring, isn’t he? Maybe if he doesn’t say anything else, she won’t notice.

“Soos, look at the road,” says Wendy. “You’ve been staring at me for thirty seconds and I’m scared that we’re going to hit a squirrel or something.”

“Nah, it’s okay, we’re almost at the Shack now, and then we can see Dipper and… And the Mr. Pineses?” Soos sighs silently through his nose. He didn’t say her name. That would have been a _disaster_.

“Pretty sure Ford’s a doctor,” replies Wendy, her tone dry. Soos shrugs and parks his pickup truck outside the Shack.

“Yeah, but that doesn’t mean he can’t be a Mr. Pines, too!” he says, leaving the truck and walking over to the front door. Wendy follows, and a quick glance shows that she’s smiling, however faintly.

Confronted with the door, however, Soos almost doesn’t knock. He stares at the handle like it is a hot iron. Woah. That would be weird, but also kind of like something he learnt in school when if there’s a fire you should check the door handle with the back of your hand before trying to open it because the metal might be hot and burn your hand if you’re not careful and hey, look, the door’s open.

“Soos!” Mr. Pines says, grinning. He’s wearing his fez again, properly instead of the weird wonky way it was last time Soos saw him, and he pats Soos’s shoulder in a way that makes Soos get the thought that feels kind of like _dad stuff_. His voice is exhausted, but somehow ridiculously happy. “Wendy! You’re not gonna believe this but-”

“Heyo!” screams a voice that Soos thought he’d never hear again. His head jerks down as his eyes widen, and sure enough, Mabel is just. There. Standing, breathing, a little tired-looking, but quite clearly doing living person things such as being alive. Waddles sits at her feet, snorting gently.

“Are you-“ Wendy splutters, and Soos turns to look at her. She’s doing the angry face. It’s not even the normal one. It’s the cheeks-going-red, possibility-of-laser-eyes one. The one that Soos would very much like to get away from, thank you very much. Mabel nudges Mr. Pines out of the way very gently and Soos squeezes past, then the two of them run towards the kitchen like the _Prepubescent Genetic Abnormality Samurai Tortoises_. Okay, so he figured out a while back that Mabel would definitely be Picasso-

“Hi, Mabel!” Dipper says, and he sounds weirdly joyful for someone who just saw his sister die and perfectly normal for someone who just had his sister come back from the dead unharmed. And also kind of weirdly joyful for someone who can hear Wendy yelling at Mr. Pines about how to tell if a prank is okay or not. “Oh, hi Soos,” he adds, as if Soos is an afterthought, which he kind of is to Mabel. He is okay with that.

“I should _probably_ go and diffuse that situation,” grins Mabel, her eyes flickering over to the vague direction of the argument. “We are literally having everything that we can for breakfast, and that includes dinosaur chicken nuggets. Grunkle Ford should be back from getting the glitter off of his face in ten minutes. Leave him some because he really likes the stegosaurus ones.”

And Mabel scurries off like a large sparkly hamster. Soos kind of wants to pet her. She’d probably purr, like a little kitten!

“Do you want pancakes or waffles?” Dipper asks, standing on a chair next to the stovetop, the waffle maker on the counter next to it. He’s watching the pan on the stove, probably, which is why he isn’t looking at Soos. Or Soos is having a bad face day. Those happen, sometimes. “Keep in mind; the waffles are probably mashed potatoes.”

Soos thinks for a moment, scratching his little baby beard that is growing slowly, and which he is nurturing, so that one day he will look like a wise, wise wizard from an overrated generic fantasy movie. “Um… Is ‘both’ an option? Because I like that option.”

Dipper flips the pancake in the pan, and it only almost falls out. It mostly lands back in the pan, and he beams as if he’s just found, like, _twenty_ more of Mr. Dr. Pines’s journal-book things. “’Both’ is _definitely_ an option.”

 

-

 

By the time that Mabel has settled Wendy and Stan’s little disagreement, Dr. Mr. Pines is sitting at the kitchen table with Soos as Dipper keeps on making pancakes. Mabel leads a bewildered Wendy and a relatively normal-looking Mr. Pines to the table, where they both sit at the remaining two seats. Waddles follows, still oinking.

“Mabel just coughed up a rainbow,” Wendy says, taking one of Soos’s fresh pancakes and pushing it into her mouth. It sticks out around the edges, and Soos could totally bite the rest of it off and eat it, but apparently you’re not supposed to put your face near another person’s unless you’re romantically involved with that person and you’re going to kiss them, which is weird because it’s only faces. Or at least, that’s what his sixth-grade teacher told him.

“Yeah, she had a lot of sprinkles last night,” Dipper shrugs, flipping a pancake perfectly this time. Soos cheers, and Dipper grins with a slight blush, which is probably from being happy and proud and shy about that fact due to it coming from a brilliant pancake flip. He continues after a moment, doing that thing when he tries to look cool by puffing his chest out a little. “That’s probably the colourings that you saw.”

Stan runs a hand through his hair, then adjusts his fez. “Kid, I’ve seen Mabel’s weird foam that she gets after a sugar rush, and believe me, this wasn’t it.”

Soos grins. “Oh, that cool thing when her mouth goes all bubbly with spit and it’s all multi-coloured and stuff? Heh, that’s awesome. Except when she pukes afterwards.” Soos takes a moment to shudder. “That’s so not cool. It’s kind of gross, especially when I have to clean it and it smells sugary and delicious but it’s not.”

Dr. Mr. Pines pushes his plate away slightly. Mabel clambers onto his lap and starts eating a velociraptor nugget. She pulls Waddles onto her knee and gives him little mouthfuls of waffles. Waffles versus Waddles! And the victory goes to Waddles! Because, you know, he’s a pig and everything.

“No,” says Wendy empathetically. “This was like, you know the gnomes?”

“Yeah,” Dipper says at about the same time as Soos, while Mabel and Ford growl in unison.

Mr. Pines rolls his eyes and flatly says, “No, I don’t remember them being in the house at all. What on earth would they be doing here?”

“You don’t remember them, Mr. Pines?” Soos asks, grabbing Mr. Pines’s hand. “Oh no, we’ve got to remind you. Somebody find Schmebulock!”

“Soos,” Dipper says. “Soos. That was sarcasm.”

Soos drops Mr. Pines’s hand and scoots back in his chair, looking down. “Uh, sorry.”

“Let’s have a sign for when we’re being sarcastic!” Mabel yells unexpectedly. Dr. Mr. Pines leans back with wide eyes as Mabel punches the air, her hand doing that hand thing that Soos sees on all of the posters that mean rock and roll! “This is our sarcasm sign!”

Mr. Pines sighs while Wendy rolls her eyes and speaks up. “You guys aren’t listening! She coughed up a cloud of rainbow like how the gnomes barf! It was really vivid, and not a normal human thing!”

Mabel leans with her elbows on the table, holding a dinosaur behind her head for Dr. Mr. Pines to eat. “Well, that’s because I’m not a normal human!”

Dipper slides onto Wendy’s chair when she shuffles up to try and fit him on too. “Literally anyone could have realised that, Mabel. You have never been normal. Ever.”

“Yeah, but my dashing good looks and lovability aren’t all I have anymore!” she grins. “I’m basically all of the chaos in the world or something.”

“No big change there, then,” Mr. Pines grunts, eating a bowl of ice cream with cereal sprinkled on the top.

Mabel slides off Dr. Mr. Pines’s lap and replaces herself with Waddles. He oinks and snuffles against Dr. Mr. Pines’s chest, and the guy does his face that looks like a confused owl before smiling and scratching Waddles under the chin.

“Watch this!” Mabel shouts, before her face pinches up really tight and she reaches out and flicks her wrist up with one finger extended and creates something that Soos isn’t really sure is real and that he knows that he will never fully process in his mind and yeah, it’s probably beyond human comprehension or something. Mabel reaches an arm through it and Soos guesses that the arm temporarily vanishes out of existence, because it’s not there but it’s not like, cut off. It’s just gone out of his limited field of understanding and comprehension and his brain is just ignoring it.

Eventually, Mabel pulls her arm out, this time with a kind of nerdy-looking book.

Dipper spits out the orange juice he had been drinking and points at the book. “I left that at home!” he shouts.

Mabel flicks her wrist upwards, her index finger pointed out, and grins. “And I just got it from there, brobro!”

“How?” splutters Dipper, and yeah, that’s kind of weird, even for Mabel.

She shrugs. “I guess I kind of exist outside the laws of nature? The voice that talked to me in the spacey place I was in after I died said that Bill basically wrecked our world and when he died, I got his powers? Because our dimension was supposed to develop our own Bill or something but he didn’t let that happen by showing up and being a poopbrain, so now it’s me.”

Soos takes a moment to think about that. So Mabel was basically Bill’s good replacement. Huh. He figured that it would have been Dipper when he was deciding who would theoretically be the best replacement for Bill, but Mabel works too.

“You’re a demon?” Dr. Mr. Pines asks. Well, he doesn’t really ask. It’s more like some kind of threatening growl at Mabel.

She winces. “No, I don’t think so. When the voice in the space dimension that’s just basically everything ever in this dimension explained it to me, I think they said something about it being like, there’s chaos in the universe, and that’s how life develops and all that, but when Bill arrived in our dimension, he stopped us from developing our own life naturally. So now that Bill’s dead, the chaos that he embodied had to go somewhere, and it went to me.” Mabel takes a moment to shrug and hold Ford’s hand. “I’m not Bill. We’re completely different species, for one thing. But I’m, like, his cool replacement. I won’t hurt you, Grunkle Ford, because Bill was a jerk and I’m glad that he’s dead and now that I have cool lifey-chaos powers, I’m gonna use them to protect my family, and that includes you!”

Dr. Mr. Pines hugs her tightly after a moment, Waddles still oinking from his lap, and Dipper says quietly, “She just said what she said before but differently.”

Wendy shrugs. “I guess he needed it phrased differently. Hey, since it’s your last day, who wants to go to the arcade using Stan’s money?”

Mabel breaks her hug with Dr. Mr. Pines for a moment to whoop with excitement, and Soos cheers too. Arcade time fun, Soos is coming for you!

 

-

 

Mabel had broken the Dancey Pants Revolution machine, Dipper had thoroughly thrashed everyone at Fight Fighters, and Soos had accidentally eaten three air hockey pucks, but those were only a few highlights from that glorious day spent in the arcade with his friends. Candy and Grenda had shown up at one point to reunite loudly and enthusiastically with their previously-dead friend before Candy had defeated Dr. Mr. Pines at ping-pong.

Now they stand at the bus stop together, waiting for the twins’ bus back to Piedmont. The normal greenness of Gravity Falls surrounds them all like a big leafy hug, with an indigo-pink sunset tinting the world with some kind of rosy filter.

The bus pulls in, as everyone had always known that it would. Soos has had experience with many beavers, and Speedy Beaver Bus Company is a good homage to them all. Even the one with the chainsaw.

 _Especially_ the one with the chainsaw.

Grenda’s suggestion of punching away emotions is a good distraction, Soos finds, from crying over two of your best friends leaving when you thought that one of them was dead, like, for good, yesterday. But she’s alive, so that’s good, and she’s going home, which is kind of good? Dipper and Mabel are going to go to school together and grow up and come back next summer, because everyone signed the letter that said _See you next summer!_ so that’s basically like a soul-binding contract.

And Soos is still crying, even though he’s avoiding looking at Dipper and Mabel saying goodbye to Mr. Pines because he knows that it will make him cry more, and Waddles wants to go with Mabel but he can’t but oh well the Mr. Pineses have sorted that out through totally normal threats of violence.

And then the twins board the bus.

And then they’re gone.

And Soos goes home, even though it feels kind of wrong because it’s like a TV show just finished and he doesn’t know what to do, because he can’t remember life before the twins anymore. The last summer feels like everything has been new again, like a really cool reboot of an anime; only now that it’s over Soos is sleeping in his bed the same way that he does every night, but this time with no more adventures to look forward to until next summer.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> holy crud i am so sorry!!! i meant to finish the next chapter so i could upload this before i went to france but things happen and now it's been almost a month??? i've been working on future plot points though while i was there!!! trust me, this is nowhere near finished!!!


	6. Triangles and Not-Dead-Chaos-Stuff

The first week back in Piedmont was pretty normal, Dipper thinks. Normal and boring, but that’s probably just Gravity Falls still being fresh in his mind. Their last year at Piedmont Middle School wasn’t really all that special compared to the apocalypse, and all of the homework in the world is worth having Mabel at his side.

“Boom!” she shouts from her side of the room. “Waddles is gonna light up the night!”

Dipper looks up from his laptop to face his sister. He can only see the back of Waddles, but he prides himself on his ability to deduce what Mabel has been doing, simply by glancing out of the corner of his eye.

“You put glow-in-the-dark stars on Waddles,” he says flatly. “I’m not sure what else I was expecting.”

Mabel grins widely, picking up her pig and turning him around. “Boom! You two are twins now!”

And, sure enough, she had carefully placed six star stickers in multiple colours on Waddles’s forehead in the pattern of the Big Dipper. Dipper rolls his eyes, even as he smiles. “Please don’t tell me you’re going to-“

Mabel places Waddles next to Dipper and swaps Wendy’s hat for her hairband to keep Dipper’s hair off of his forehead, before taking out her camera and snapping a photo of the two of them next to each other. Dipper stares at the camera while projecting the most hopeless annoyance he can muster. Waddles probably just looks cute.

It’s weird how easily Mom and Dad let Mabel keep Waddles. Dipper had a whole list of arguments prepared, such as, _he keeps Mabel grounded when she is about to have a meltdown_ , and _he has literally only peed where he’s not meant to once_ , but as soon as Waddles showed up they both expressed vague concern one time and then acted like the pig was completely normal. Like, they avoid tripping over him even when they can’t see him. Well, it’s probably similar to Monsieur Fluffersnart, the cat that Mabel was supposed to take care of over the summer before they were both sent to Gravity Falls.

Mabel switches back her and Dipper’s respective headgear, but Dipper adjusts Wendy’s hat before patting Waddles on the head. Nobody can ever get the hair to go down under the hat right! He picks his laptop up from where it was knocked onto his bed and continues his forum post.

_To be honest, the world is most likely not going to end this year, and if it does, it will likely be a situation similar to the Ancient Norse Ragnarok. This means that we will probably have four years to survive during the apocalypse, and it will probably be fixed by then. There have been situations similar to this for years, and the world still hasn’t ended yet._

“Hey, Mabel,” he says, looking up. “Do you know when the world is going to end?”

Mabel closes her eyes and makes a long farting sound with her mouth as she lies back on her bed. She picks up Waddles and places him on her face, where he sits loyally, if a little confused. After five minutes, a quiet snoring sound can be heard from Waddles’s belly, and Dipper smiles with an exasperated sigh as he clicks the send button on his post.

He is in the middle of zoning out while watching a playthrough of a Monstermon hack when Mabel sits up abruptly, Waddles falling onto her lap, and she says, “It’s going to end a _lot_.”

Dipper grunts, raising an eyebrow. “Huh?”

“The world,” Mabel clarifies. “The world is going to end. A _lot_. We… _Might_ have a problem with that.”

“I asked you that, uh,” Dipper checks the clock on the laptop before shutting it down. “Two hours ago. You were asleep for two hours.”

“I wasn’t asleep,” Mabel says with a pout. “I was in the knowledge spacey thing.”

They are silent for a moment, with Waddles oinking and chewing on the corner of Mabel’s duvet. Dipper picks up one of his Sibling Brothers books.

“I was _spacing out_ ,” Mabel says, with an awed tone that would befit a giant dragon far more than it would a pun.

“Grunkle Stan would cry at that joke,” replies Dipper, already absorbed in the case of the capricious cetacean.

Mabel hums quietly, silent for a moment, before saying, “Go to sleep, Dipper.”

Dipper grunts with absolutely no intention of going to sleep. Seriously, this cetacean is really capricious.

“Seriously, go to sleep, you’re going to, I dunno,” Mabel yawns. “You’re going to look like Robbie with the dark circles under your eyes.”

Or at least, Dipper thinks she said something like that, because the capriciousness is truly contagious. Wait, did she say that he was anything like Robbie?

He turns to look at his sister, placing his book down on his chest, and wakes up to their shared alarm ringing.

 

-

 

And it’s the start of learning trigonometry. _Great_.

It’s just basic things, stuff that Dipper figured out by himself ages ago, so he’s mostly just explaining it to Mabel in a way that she can understand when the teacher leaves the classroom for five minutes.

And, inevitably, the students begin to mess around, because they are newly-minted teenagers in a classroom. One, and Dipper’s pretty sure that he’s called Connor, gets up and erases the middle of the example equilateral triangle on the whiteboard before drawing an eye in the middle. Dipper glances over to his left to look at Mabel with a wide-eyed frown of resignation, to find that Mabel is doing the exact same thing. They lock eyes, then turn their gazes down to their work. For a split second, Dipper sees a single blinking eye, but then it’s gone and he goes back to calculating the area of the triangle. However, the noise around him doesn’t stop, and people are adding various things to the whiteboard. There are, of course, multiple poor diagrams of a penis, due to the fact that everyone in the room is between the ages of thirteen and fourteen. However, the once-example, now-Illuminati triangle has also been added to.

It has a top hat, okay? Dipper groans quietly, because someone did give it arms and legs, but they are surprisingly muscular arms.

Hey, at least there isn’t a bow tie!

…And Dipper should really stop feeling hopeful about anything.

He feels Mabel squeeze his hand, and he looks up to see her glaring at the whiteboard. She raises her other hand, and waves her pinkie finger very gently. Slowly, but surely, the lines on the board begin to erase, leaving only little smears of dried whiteboard flecks that occasionally fall to the floor with none of the grace of snow and all of the grace of extraordinarily tiny anvils.

“Dude, what’s happening?” one of the kids says, holding another student’s hand.

“Is that a ghost?” another whispers.

Someone starts screaming, and someone else begins to cry, and when Dipper looks at Mabel he sees that she is barely containing her giggles, because her chest is doing the thing that looks like an asthma attack but it isn’t, and her hand quivers as she finishes wiping off most of the triangle from the board. Well, at least he-

At least it’s not there anymore. It. Not he. _He_ implies _Bill_ and _it_ implies _object_ so definitely it. It it it. Dang it, he’s turning into Mabel.

“Yes, your ancient deceased ancestors have returned to tell you all that triangles _suck_ ,” Dipper whispers, and Mabel seals up the window so that she can stifle her laughs with the hand that isn’t holding Dipper’s. When she looks up again she looks at Dipper in the eye and they both end up laughing again, until the teacher returns.

“This is a mess!” she shouts, and she has probably never seen the aftermath of one of Mabel’s sleepovers or Stan’s publicity parties. There’s just most of the kids hiding under their desks and Mabel and Dipper with an expression of mild bewilderment. It’s not like there’s silly string in the rafters or sequins in your toothpaste.

They’re getting really good at switching expressions and hiding weird things now. What else are they meant to do? Let their parents see Mabel turning water into glitter glue and Dipper having a panic attack because the clouds outside the window kind of looked like a cross against the setting sun?

So Dipper supposes that the teacher’s thought process goes something like this.

First, she walks back into the classroom. Second, she sees most of her students terrified. Third, she sees two of her students looking kind of confused and not terrified. Fourth, she sees her hard work on trigonometry wiped off the board.

Fifth, she considers the next thing that she should do would be to ask Dipper and Mabel what had happened.

And look, he didn’t really have a cover story, so he just – they just – shrug nonchalantly. It’s not like there’s anything the two of them can do without giving some weird version of the truth that avoided the fact that he has some kind of issue with triangles and Mabel is some kind of not-dead-chaos-thing.

So they shrug. Which is apparently a good idea, because the teacher asks the next kid who emerges from under their desk, who says something about the ghost story that seems to be everyone’s individual hypothesis on what happened, and the teacher says something like, “Ghosts are dumb, blah blah, they’re not real, blah blah blah,” and Mabel snorts quietly with laughter.

Dipper scowls, because that ghost encounter that Mabel was probably thinking about was _not funny whatsoever_. It was _humiliating_ and _annoying_ and that lamb costume was kind of smelly. But the Northwest incident made him look so awesome, until he got turned into a tree. Man, he has really bad luck with these things.

But the teacher goes on to continue educating her terrified class about trigonometry, and after a few more whispered pointers, Mabel finally understands how to find the area of a triangle.

 

-

 

“And then we got detention for, like a week!” Mabel laughs.

Grunkle Stan laughs, but Dipper is watching Ford through the webcam that Soos bought them for Scape sessions with the twins. Grunkle Ford’s face is contorted, with furrowed brows and thin lips. Just as Dipper takes a breath to ask if Ford is alright, Mabel gets there first. Kind of.

“Grunkle Ford, are you okay? You’ve got that difficult-poop expression that Dipper gets when he’s trying to do a puzzle.”

Ford blinks. “Difficult-poop expression?”

Dipper groans. Seriously, why does his sister have the worst ways of explaining things sometimes? “Constipated, Grunkle Ford. She means that you look constipated when you’re focused.”

Grunkle Ford’s face changes to more of what Mabel calls _confowlded_. It’s got something to do with him looking like a confused owl? Dipper has no idea. Or rather, he has an idea and he wishes that he didn’t because Mabel’s thought process is weirder than that one Sasquatch that Dipper met after falling asleep in a tree.

Look, he was half-asleep, the Sasquatch thought that because of the groan he gave that he was a baby, and started juggling him in order to send him back to sleep. It… Well, he needed Mabel’s help in getting out of it. Somehow, it knew exactly what she was saying and treated her as more of an adult than Dipper, even though, frankly, her face looks far more like a baby’s than his. Eh, probably a side effect of dying and becoming the embodiment of chaos or something.

“Dipper?” Grunkle Stan’s voice says. “Earth to Dipper, we’re trying to have a conversation with you here.”

Dipper blinks. “Oh, uh, yes, I just got caught up in remembering the Sasquatch yesterday.”

Ford beams. “A Sasquatch? In Piedmont?”

“Yeah,” says Mabel. “It thought that Dipper was a baby.”

“Can’t blame it!” Grunkle Stan laughs, his loudness making the microphone crackle. “He looks like one enough anyway!”

Dipper stares directly at the camera as Stan and Mabel share an “ _Eyyy_!” in joint feeling-clever-ness.

“Give me a second, I need to get Journal Two,” Grunkle Ford says, pushing his chair out and standing. For a moment, his lower torso fills the screen before he walks away and they can see Grunkle Stan again.

“Is this going to be nerd talk?” asks Stan, clearly to Mabel.

“Yeah,” she shrugs, “but the start should be pretty funny. And Mabel saves the day, as per usual.”

Dipper squints at his sister. “Um, I’m pretty sure we save each other the same amount.”

“Not with my cool new powers, we don’t!” laughs Mabel. “ _Glitter burp_!”

And, yep, sure enough, she takes a deep breath and belches up rainbow glitter, which floats around her head like a dispersing cloud. Disgusting, but cool.

Stan is silent for a moment, before laughing with glee. “Atta girl!”

Mabel mock-bows a couple of times, but then Grunkle Ford comes back with the journal and a fountain pen, sits right back down, flips the book open, and uncaps his pen with one hand, flipping it around and placing the cap on the end before adjusting the pen to write with.

“Dipper,” he grins. “Tell me _everything_.”

Mabel makes a pterodactyl screech that manages to sound not only like the not-dinosaur that Grunkle Stan saved Waddles from, but also suspiciously like “ _Nerd stuff!_ ” as she leaves the room.

After five minutes of explaining how Mabel seemed to view the Sasquatch, Stanley leaves, saying something about how he can’t take anymore nerdery. For a moment, Ford glances around, holding his breath, before letting it escape his mouth in a quiet, slow breath.

“Dipper, is Mabel nearby?” he asks, leaning in closer to the webcam microphone with a softened voice.

Dipper blinks. “No, why?”

Grunkle Ford runs a six-fingered hand through his hair. He takes a clump and pulls gently, closing his eyes. When he reopens them, he looks as cold as stone and strangely vulnerable.

“Are you sure that she _is_ Mabel?” he finally says. His voice comes out as a hoarse choking sound, and his brows furrow to crease his forehead like old paper.

“Of course I am, Grunkle Ford!” Dipper replies earnestly. “I know her as well as I know myself; maybe even better. The only way someone could know her better would be to read her mind.”

“Read her mind…” echoes Ford. He shakes his head after a moment before forcing a small smile. “Thank you, Dipper. I’m sorry that I need these sorts of reassurances, but, ah, you know how it is.” He shrugs awkwardly, his smile becoming self-deprecating and lopsided, before his face and hands drop. “I’ll… I’ll do my best not to let it become a problem.”

Dipper does his best to smile reassuringly, but it might have come out as more condescending and belittling. “It’s okay, Grunkle Ford. We love you, and you can talk to us about anything, you know that?”

Grunkle Ford hesitates for a moment, before returning the smile and looking years younger. “Yes. Yes, I… I _do_.”

“Then take care of yourself,” Dipper says, “and trust your family.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> next time: ford takes over again!  
> the time after that: the first word is "you"


	7. Claustrophobe

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> panic attacks cw i suppose? because, well, i have no clue how panic/anxiety attacks work. all i know is that i get them

“WELL, WELL, WELL, SHOOTING STAR, SO YOU THOUGHT I WAS GONE?”

Mabel shudders. She’s been hiding under the bed for a few hours, now, but Bill still won’t leave. She doesn’t even know if he knows where she’s hiding, and when she tried to make a window, her magicy chaosy thing did nothing. It’s like she’s back to being a normal human. Seriously, she doesn’t even have her sweater on! Just a torn t-shirt and a stained skirt, with numb and bare feet.

“THAT’S ADORABLE! KIND OF LIKE YOUR LITTLE PET PIGGY’S LAST MOMENTS! THOSE LITTLE SNUFFLES AND ALL THAT BLOOD, BRINGS A TEAR TO MY EYE EVERY TIME.”

No. No, no, no, not Waddles. Waddles has to be safe because Dipper said that pigs can live for a very long time in captivity and Waddles keeps Mabel safe and grounded, but she can’t see him and she can’t hear him and he’s not with her. She wants Waddles, or at least one of her stuffed toys from her bed, or even just a soft blanket! But Bill is there and she can’t let herself do anything, or else he’ll get her. And Bill getting _anyone_ never ends well.

“SO, YOU’RE PLAYING HIDE-AND-SEEK, HUH? I USED TO PLAY THAT WITH OLD NICK AND NELLY! THEY NEVER DID GIVE MY PET ROCK BACK!”

She keeps on stifling her sobs, only letting herself choke out a breath when Bill speaks. And boy, does he speak a _lot_. If Mabel ever thought that she might forget his voice, she’s sure she won’t now. Because she can’t escape. All she can do is lie under the narrow space between her bed and the carpet with a load of dust in her nose and feel afraid every time a sliver of glowing yellow comes into her limited view.

“YOU KNOW IT’S NOT GOING TO BE LONG UNTIL I FIND YOU!”

Yes, she does know that, and it’s terrifying and she can’t breathe so she wriggles and shifts so she can lie on her back. She puts one hand on her chest, right on her rapidly beating heart, and the other hand on her stomach, and she breathes. In, two, three, four. Out, two, three, four.

“TWINKLE, TWINKLE, SHOOTING STAR…”

Her breathing doesn’t slow. In fact, it becomes some kind of frenzied waltz, going _in two three, out two three, in two three_. She closes her eyes, trying to focus on the breaths and even them out.

“I KNOW EXACTLY…”

Mabel squirms, her fists clenching. She cracks an eyelid open slightly, ready to run. Or at least she _would_ be if she wasn’t under her bed. Seriously, why did she do this?

“…WHERE YOU A̛Ŕ̢̛E!”

Mabel screams; her vision filled with yellow.

 

-

 

Ford jolts up in his bed.

 _Fuck_ , that was a bad nightmare. But why was he Mabel? And why was he under a bed? That all seems pretty dull-witted for even his subconscious mind.

He rubs at the tattoo on his neck.

Okay, so maybe his mind _is_ capable of intense stupidity. At least the word he switched on that tattoo still scans with the rest of the song.

His ears twitch as he notices another noise somewhere in the house. It appears to be-

The phone. Great. And Stanley won’t hear it because he takes his hearing aid out at night now that Ford is around, usually awake and always with a gun, just in case.

He guesses that he doesn’t have a choice.

Well, he does. He could just let it ring, but it could be one of those really annoying robots that will never stop calling, and Ford’s awake now anyway, so he might as well see what it is.

He puts his glasses back on and slides off of the couch, picking up his trenchcoat that he had folded next to his head, and rubs his right eye. He stumbles through the halls of the Shack until he finds the room with the telephone in. The children had told Ford about some new kind of smart cellular telephone, much like the one that Fiddleford had built but far more computerised, but of course Stanley still used Ford’s old phone from the late seventies. The stingy knucklehead. The other phones tell you who is calling! That’s _useful_!

“Stanford Pines?” he says, picking up the receiver. “Also, it’s, ah…” He looks at the clock on the opposite wall. “Three in the morning, so this had better be bloody important.”

“Grunkle Ford,” Dipper’s quavering, quiet voice whimpers from the phone. “Mabel’s gone missing.”

His grip tightens on the phone. She could be anywhere with Bill’s, no, _her_ powers. Bill didn’t open portals through spacetime. He got other selfish fools to do it for him. Maybe he’s back, and better, but he can’t be because Ford has held Mabel; she isn’t Bill because she gave him dinosaur chicken nuggets gently and she cuddled him while doing so, but Bill would have taken that opportunity to use Mabel’s surprising strength to punch Ford and that means that Mabel is missing; his grandniece is missing and he can’t do anything except panic and-

No; he needs to be calm. Breathe, breathe; damn it! He tries to focus on his intellect, but all he can think of is Mabel gone and having to destroy his brother and he’s not smart, not at all, and now is not the time to be having a crisis so _breathe_. Remember the Oracle, remember lying on a calm ocean and feeling the gentle waves roll beneath, and breathe, two, three, four.

“Grunkle Ford?” Dipper’s voice repeats quietly.

“It’s okay, Dipper, I’m here,” Ford says softly. “Have you checked all around your bedroom?”

There is silence for a moment, then Dipper replies, “Yes.”

“Okay, have you tried the bathroom?” he asks. Ford drags a hand through his hair, the twirls his fingers around a few strands and pulls. Huh. Maybe Fiddleford had a good idea with literally pulling out his hair to calm down.

Ford flinches as what is possibly a sigh or a groan loudly comes through the phone. “Yes,” says Dipper. “I’ve checked literally everywhere, and that includes the roof and everywhere outside in a five metre radius.”

“You’re inside now, right?” asks Ford. Dipper needs to be inside. It’s cold and it’s autumn and it’s dark and if something happens then, then _Stanley_ will break. Stanley will.

“Yeah,” Dipper says after a pause.

Stanford tries to smile reassuringly and fails. Lucky that Dipper can’t see him. “Okay, just stay there, stay calm, I’ll try and see if I can find anything-“

There is a knock on the door. Well, there are several knocks. They’re very loud knocks. And whatever it is just keeps knocking like they’re going to punch in the door, and Ford has to go and see what’s happening because it could be a monster or a lost person or _Mabel_.

“I have to go, Dipper,” Ford says. “I’ll be back, just please _stay put_.”

“Gru-“

He hangs up and pulls another few strands of hair out. He’s here, he’s alive, and if anything tries to hurt him or his family, he will destroy it.

The walk through the living room and the gift shop seems to take an age, though it is only really a matter of seconds. Ford is really fast. He was proud of that, once.

Thankfully, the gift shop window is clear so Ford can clearly see a pale freckled face with wide green eyes. He opens the door immediately and Wendy collapses in, gasping. Her breath comes out in little clouds, even though she’s wearing a fluffy green turtleneck with an axe on it.

“Ford, I-“

He cuts her off with a raised finger. “What was the first thing you said to me when we met?”

“Something like _‘Sup Stan Two_ ,” she replies with a shrug. “Soos kept me up all night talking about it so I wasn’t really awake.”

Ford nods, closing the door and locking it again. “Why are you here?” he asks. “It’s the middle of the night, and this place is in the middle of the forest. It’s dangerous!”

“I’m a Corduroy,” she replies flippantly, before her tone settles into something much darker. “And I’ve found out where Mabel is.”

“What?” says Ford in what is definitely not a screech. “How, where, wh-“

“Turn on the news,” she says, walking into the living room and pulling her phone out of her pyjama pocket. “I’ve been trying to call Dipper but he’s not answered.”

“He’s been talking to me,” Ford replies, taking Wendy by the wrist and pulling her into the living room as she swipes and presses the screen of her phone. “I tried to calm him down but-“

“Yeah,” says Wendy inattentively as Ford tries to remember which channel the news is. “He’s not gonna calm down until she’s there again. In Mabel’s bubble he was less tense than he as outside even though it was, you know, Mabel’s dream world and Dipper’s nightmare. She was there. She isn’t now, so… Dipper! Turn on the news, we found Mabel, kind of!”

She pulls the phone away from her ear and presses the screen just as Ford finally gets the TV working. A news anchor is speaking in front of a screen, where he can quite clearly see Mabel floating above the Empire State Building.

Well, he supposes that he might as well develop a bald patch to match Stanley’s.

“Jesus Christ, what is she _doing_?” says Ford through his teeth.

“Aren’t you Jewish?” asks Wendy.

“No, I’m a _scientist_ ,” replies Ford, pulling out a few more hairs. “But that’s beside the point! Mabel’s up there, and I can’t develop teleportation technology fast enough to get her down!”

Wendy clenches her fists as she looks at the screen. “Well, develop it faster!”

“I _can’t_!” shouts Ford, before clapping his hands over his mouth, desperately hoping that Stanley hasn’t woken up because of him even as his mind criticises his word choice. He could develop that kind of technology, but he would probably also need Fiddleford, who he hasn’t seen since the apocalypse, and _he can’t do this right now_. His brain is screaming every issue at him and he can’t focus on anything that isn’t Mabel and danger and fear.

“Oh jeez, Ford,” mutters Wendy, or, well, she might have, but that’s not really what he’s focusing on right now. What he _is_ focusing on is the fact that Mabel could die right now and he wouldn’t be able to do anything and it would be his fault and Stan would kill him and Ford would be okay with that because he deserves it and-

A heavy weight is dumped over his shoulders, reminding him of where he is. This is a sensation, this is real, he is awake and breathing and this isn’t a nightmare. That’s… Surprisingly comforting, to be honest.

“I guess it’s lucky that the twins forgot their weighted blanket,” Wendy grins. Her face then subsides into a more neutral expression. “And that, you know, you also do that pressure stim thing.”

Ford shakes his head, unable to speak for a minute. Instead, he breathes, and tries to focus on the steady inhalations and exhalations. In through his nose, thinking of how he feels, and out though his mouth, still focusing on inside himself and not outside sensation except for the very heavy blanket, and it’s working for once! Therapy might not be such a waste of time and effort after all.

His breathing jolts as his mind flips through memories of the night like pages of a grimoire, looking for answers. “Dipper can hear this, can’t he?”

“My phone,” Wendy breathes, before picking it up off of the side and trying to get it to work, probably. “ _Unlock_ , you fuckbrick!”

Ford tugs at a few strands of hair; plucking them out and letting the very mild pain ground him. He won’t panic again. He won’t, and well, he can’t. His limbs are heavy and he could sleep for the rest of the week right now, which Stanley would kill for Ford to say, probably.

“He hung up,” says Wendy quietly.

“How long ago?” says Ford, his voice shaking. He can’t shout at Wendy, not again. She’s just as scared and stressed as him, but he can’t calm her down, not when they’re both so agitated.

She flicks around on the phone’s screen, before saying, “Five minutes ago.”

Ford opens his mouth to respond to that statement with words that he hasn’t quite decided on yet, when a loud thudding noise comes from the door. His hand flies to his hip, ready to grab his gun from the holster, but he doesn’t pull it out yet. That will happen when he sees whoever dared to arrive at Ford’s home without Mabel Pines.

He approaches the door, the one closest to the kitchen instead of the one that led into the gift shop, with a cold fury in his eyes.

The old man takes a breath,  gripping his gun, and he opens the door.


	8. Spaceships Are Supposed To Soar

_You shot my wings, but I still fly! Soaring high, soaring high!_

Pacifica slaps her phone by her bedside, trying to get it to be quiet. Seriously, it might be seven in the morning, but it feels like the middle of the night!

She squints against her phone’s bright light. Huh. It actually _is_ the middle of the night, or close enough anyway. And Dipper’s calling? She swears, if that guy keeps complaining about his insomnia to her, she’s going to have to send him a selection of medications recommended by Grenda, McGucket, and her butler Warren. With a sigh, she lets her thumb flick to accept the call.

“What the heck, Dipper?” she groans. “It’s like, the middle of the night!”

The other end of the phone crackles, and when Pacifica listens closely, she can hear faint sobs.

“Was it a nightmare?” asks Pacifica, her tone far gentler than normal. “You know that Bill’s gone, he can’t hurt y-“

“Mabel’s missing,” Dipper says. There is a sudden pause, and Pacifica’s eyes widen. “Well, she’s kind of floating above the Empire State Building, and I called Wendy and Ford but they were both freaking out and you’re like, nature’s warrior or something, I don’t know, ask Larry King’s Disembodied Wax Head. And you don’t really freak out a lot? And you have a private jet so you could probably get to her quicker than we can.”

“Sorry, but the jet’s in storage in Portland and I don’t know if-“ She stops. Hadn’t Candy said something at the start of the school year? Something that could be helpful? Either way, Candy knows McGucket better than Pacifica does, and McGucket could come up with something that could…

“Pacifica? Pacifica, are you still there?” Dipper’s voice crackles.

“Yeah, don’t worry,” she smiles, getting out of bed and beginning to change her clothes. “I’ve got a plan to get Mabel back.”

 

-

 

Warren had winked at Pacifica when she had left the new Northwest Mansion. It doesn’t have several wings for guests and family members, but it’s still bigger than the Mystery Shack, and that includes the three basements.

Thankfully, the new gates are easier to climb, and Pacifica only gets one hole in her leggings. That’s definitely an improvement, but it’s not the point. She lands on the tarmac on the other side of the gate, bending her legs to absorb the shock into the soles of her rhinestone-studded suede boots. Then she stands, stretches out, and walks away silently down the road until she arrives at the junction that leads to Candy’s house.

How is she supposed to let Candy know? Pacifica unclasps her purse as she walks along. Flashlight, which was a useful thought but unnecessary due to the bright streetlamps; lipgloss, which she always needs; some tooth-whitening gum. No phone. Her stomach sinks, because it’s either fallen out of her purse’s tight clasp or it’s still on charge in her bedroom. To be honest, it is almost definitely the latter.

She almost forgets to stop at the Chiu family residence, but the muscle memory that she definitely doesn’t have stops her. One of the windows has the blinds drawn, but a series of multi-coloured lights shine through them, flowing from left to right. Pacifica kneels, grabs a small pebble, and flings it at the window. It bounces off, and the blinds shift to show Candy blinking before smiling broadly. The blinds swing back to being closed, and within five seconds Candy has opened the front door, Grenda in tow.

“Pacifica! Have you come to join our super makeover party?” asks Candy, smiling and bouncing a little on her toes.

“We’re gonna read my mom’s books!” Grenda adds, miraculously waking nobody. “She keeps them in a drawer under the bed and reads them when she thinks I’m not there!”

Pacifica twitches, gritting her teeth behind a smile. “Um. Great? I’m here on more important business, though.”

“Ugh! Business!” yells Grenda. Seriously, how are people _not_ awake?

“What kind of business?” replies Candy. “Does it involve… _Puppies_?”

Closing her eyes, Pacifica takes a deep breath in through her nose before exhaling slowly. “If that will help us get to New York City in less than an hour, then I suppose that this business _may_ include puppies.”

“This business will not involve puppies,” Candy says gravely.

“Okay, I’m glad we settled that!” says Pacifica, retaining her false smile but not bothering to relax her wide eyes to something less manic. “Do you know how to get to the Empire State Building, preferably the top, in less than an hour?”

Candy stares into the distance, narrowing her eyes. “Yes. Possibly. Hopefully.”

“Also, are you two in your pyjamas?” asks Pacifica.

“Of course! This is a sleepover!” Grenda shouts. “Or it was! It’s probably a top-secret mission now!”

“You should probably get dressed. I mean, it’s September! You can’t go out in that,” Pacifica says, gesturing to Grenda’s thin nightshirt and Candy’s rather cute t-shirt and shorts matching sheep pyjamas.

“Grenda is invincible!” Grenda bellows. “Let my muscular arms guard you from the cold air!”

As the two of them step outside, not even wearing slippers, Candy closes the door before Grenda scoops her up in her gorgeously strong arms. A second arm wraps around Pacifica, and she feels herself being cradled against a muscular chest covered in a warm layer of fat.

Then, Grenda starts running, and Candy yells “ _To the shed!_ ” and Pacifica is screaming wordlessly because literally _anything_ could have been on that floor! And Grenda is barefoot? _Why_?

Pacifica knows this route, because this is the path that her parents’ limousine had taken to get into town from the mansion. Grenda is taking her to her old house, there’s no doubt about it. There aren’t any other buildings in this part of Gravity Falls.

Her fears are confirmed when Grenda runs through the open gates and places Candy and Pacifica down before opening the unlocked front door.

“McGucket!” yells Grenda, and Pacifica can feel the floorboards tremble under her feet. “McGucket, we have a Code Emergency!”

Five seconds later, a rather clean hillbilly scampers down the stairs on all fours, panting a little, before standing up and stretching.

“A Code Emergency, y’say?” he asks. “Well, I’ve been developing the perfect thing! Now, Grendy and Canda, you two go and get dressed, I don’t want you catching a cold or nothing!”

Pacifica blinks as McGucket pulls out a tablet computer from behind his beard. He taps something in and a small, repetitive beeping in B-flat begins.

“This should summon one of the thingymagoofers for security from the spaceship hidden under the town to the Mystery Shack!” he says, grinning. “Then we can fly it to get Mabel!”

What.

“How did you know that was what we came for?” asks Pacifica. “We didn’t even tell you.”

“Well, I have a lot of people living here, and some of them stay up all night,” replies McGucket, shrugging.

“There is a vampire family,” Candy whispers, “but I am not interested in any of them. I do not have time for romance when I am helping to build giant robots!”

Pacifica doesn’t even try to answer that, and even if she did she would have been cut off by Grenda grabbing hold of her and Candy again and running out of the mansion, followed by McGucket.

This… This is really an obscene amount of running around in the dark. It’s completely inappropriate! There could be kidnappers, or gang members, or a manotaur urinating on a tree, which literally nobody ever would want to see.

But, hey, Mabel trusts Grenda and so does that Austrian guy that Pacifica’s parents were trying to set her up with before the ghost thing happened, so Grenda can probably be trusted to punch any kidnappers or gang members or peeing manotaurs. Or is it menotaurs? She’s going to have to ask Dipper about that.

But for now, she was just going to tolerate the ride. Not enjoy it, obviously, because she’s being hauled around like a commoner’s luggage, but tolerate it. Definitely tolerate it.

 

-

 

McGucket had lead Pacifica and her friends around to the side door to the house, saying that it would be “Less of a shock to Ford! He doesn’t really like being around the gift shop, he says the window makes him nervous.” Of course, you and Mabel’s friends agreed to do so, because McGucket had apparently known Stanford since college and the two of them are still close friends after a thirty-year _problem_ got sorted out.

Frankly, Pacifica no longer trusts the old coot, because Stanford Pines is pointing some kind of science fiction ray gun at the four of them, which is, like, rude as _heck_.

“Sweet and honeyed Godzilla!” cries McGucket, and Stanford lowers the gun with a look of deep confusion, kind of like a deer in the headlights. Mabel does that sometimes. Well, she did it once. And it wasn’t because Pacifica had hugged her and lifted her off of her feet. Definitely not. Pacifica Northwest was nowhere near the arcade on the Pines twins’ final day in Gravity Falls.

“Fiddleford!” he replies. “What are you doing here? Why are there children here?”

“Because Dipper called _me_ after you were apparently useless,” interjects Pacifica, “and if you would be so kind, an alien spacecraft is coming to pick us up in…”

“Five seconds!” McGucket finishes.

“Are you kidding?” asks a voice from behind Ford, and right, Dipper did say that Wendy was at the Shack with Ford or something like that.

“It’s big and we built it from parts of the spaceship under town!” Grenda interjects.

“It almost killed Mr. McGucket and I!” adds Candy. “But Grenda punched it until it gave up!”

McGucket looks sheepish at that, and he opens his mouth to speak when the spaceship descends with a roar like a helicopter before hovering three feet above the Shack’s roof. It was obviously once a metallic silver, but had been painted over roughly in metallic green and blue paint, with orange letters proclaiming it to be the _Mystery-Mobile!_.

Pacifica swears to herself that she will never call it that. _Spaceship_ is fine.

“You’re serious,” Wendy groans as the air settles around the spaceship to more of a low murmur than a gale.

“Probably!” replies McGucket. “Now, let’s go and get Mabel!”

“What’s going on?”

Oh, so Stanley Pines didn’t know about this. Figures. He’s _old_. Not that Stanford isn’t old, but to be polite, Mr. Mystery aged poorly.

“Mabel is missing, so we are finding her with this spaceship!” Candy says.

Stanley squints like Dipper does when he’s confused, clenches his giant hairy fists, and says, “What the _fuck_? Uh, I mean heck.”

“She’s hovering over the Empire State Building,” Wendy replies. “Ford was having a panic attack or something, and, um, why are you guys here?”

She addresses the last part to the group outside, and Pacifica says, “Since you two were apparently useless, Dipper called me instead. So now you’ve got a ride to New York City, and you’re welcome.”

Stanford splutters. “You… I… Thank you, I think?”

“Wait just a moment,” Stanley says, walking out of the Shack and addressing both groups. “Are you saying that Mabel’s missing and that this nerdy spaceship will take us to her?”

“I believe that Candy just said that, yes,” replies Pacifica. Are these old men stupid or what?

Well, apparently one of them was smart enough to install some way of getting into the spaceship when they modified it, but they could at least have had the decency to make the only way in or out something a little more durable that a rope ladder. As Pacifica climbs it, she tries to ignore the fact that almost everyone here except possibly Candy Chiu is heavier than her, and that any of them could break the ladder and send everyone plummeting to their doom. Like, she doesn’t want to end up as part of a mound of broken corpses in the woods, especially not with _these_ people and with _this_ outfit!

For a second, she glances down at Grenda, who is climbing up behind her. Then her eyes shift to the ground beneath, and it’s so far away that the trees are just little blurry patches on the ground.

As if he’s reading her mind, or maybe her horrified expression as she clambers up with more speed and a stronger grip than before, McGucket calls down from the spaceship that he arrived at in mere seconds of climbing and says, “Well, if we move while y’all folks’re still climbing up, we should be able to pick up Dipper on the way!”

When she dies, her parents are _so_ going to sue that guy.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> tbh i almost called this chapter Actual Tiny Lesbian Pacifica Northwest


End file.
